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Jews, Consumer Culture, and Jewish Consumer Cultures: An Introduction

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Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America

Part of the book series: Worlds of Consumption ((WC))

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Abstract

More than a decade ago, Jewish studies witnessed an economic turn, driven by a growing interest in Jews’ economic activities, Jewish-gentile economic contacts, and the economic dimensions of Jewish emancipation, acculturation, and persecution. This turn unveiled a variety of new analytical perspectives on Jews as both consumers and creators of commercial and retail cultures. It also shed new light on core topics like migration, Zionism, antisemitism, marginalization, gender, and the reshaping of Jewish religious and familial life in modernity. This chapter offers an overview of this thriving research on Jewish and gentile consumer cultures, on structural conflicts between consumption and religion, and on the lure, challenges, and disappointments of modern consumer cultures in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and America. Finally, it presents the main results of the case studies in this volume and reflects on methodological issues and topics for future research.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    [Fritz] Lamm, “Wirtschaftsverhältnisse unterstützter Familien,” Concordia 20 (1913): 273–77. Similar conditions were found in New York; see Maurice Fishberg, “Die Armut unter den Juden in New-York,” Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden 4 (1908): 113–18; Caroline Goodyear, “Household Budgets of the Poor,” Charities and the Commons 16, no. 4 (1906): 191–97.

  2. 2.

    Gideon Reuveni and Nils Roember convened a pioneering conference on Jews and consumer culture at University College London in 2006. Some of the papers from that conference along with other material were published in their edited volume Longing, Belonging, and the Making of Jewish Consumer Culture (Leiden, 2010). See also Gideon Reuveni, Consumer Culture and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity (Cambridge, 2018).

  3. 3.

    See esp. Frank Trentmann, The Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers from the Fifteenth Century through the Twenty-First (New York, 2016); Gary Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why Consumerism Won in Modern America (New York, 2002); Peter N. Stearns, Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire (New York, 2006); Hartmut Berghoff and Uwe Spiekermann, eds., Decoding Modern Consumer Societies (New York, 2012); John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London, 1993); Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge, 2008); Victoria de Grazia with Ellen Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley, CA, 2006); Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, Konsum und Handel: Europa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2003).

  4. 4.

    Above all, see Rebecca Kobrin and Adam Teller, eds., Purchasing Power: The Economics of Modern Jewish History (Philadelphia, PA, 2015). Also: Cornelia Aust, “Jewish Economic History,“ Oxford Bibliographies 2015, https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199840731-0106; Gideon Reuveni and Sarah Wobick-Segev, eds., The Economy in Jewish History: New Perspectives on the Interrelationship between Ethnicity and Economic Life (New York, 2011); Eli Lederhendler, Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, 2009); Adam Teller, “Culture and Money: The Economic Dimensions of Cultural History and What It Can Teach Us,” Jewish Quarterly Review 104 (2014): 278–87; and Rebecca Kobrin, “Destructive Creators: Sender Jarmulowsky and Financial Failure in the Annals of American Jewish History,” American Jewish History 97, no. 2 (2013): 105–37.

  5. 5.

    Good examples of an intellectual history of antisemitism are David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York, 2013); Fritz Backhaus, Raphael Gross, and Liliane Weissberg, eds., Juden. Geld. Eine Vorstellung (Frankfurt am Main, 2013); Nicolas Berg, ed., Kapitalismusdebatten um 1900: Über antisemitisierende Semantiken des Jüdischen (Leipzig, 2011); William David Rubinstein, “Jews in the Economic Elites of Western Nations and Antisemitism,” Jewish Journal of Sociology 10 (2010): 5–35. For some empirical evidence, see Uwe Spiekermann, Basis der Konsumgesellschaft: Entstehung und Entwicklung des modernen Kleinhandels in Deutschland 1850–1914 (Munich, 1999).

  6. 6.

    Examples of such antisemitism: Eduard von Hartmann, Das Judentum in Gegenwart und Zukunft (Leipzig, 1885); Hermann Ahlwardt, Der Verzweiflungskampf der arischen Völker mit dem Judentum (Berlin, 1890); Theodor Fritsch, ed., Handbuch der Judenfrage, 26th ed. (Hamburg, 1907).

  7. 7.

    See above all, Derek J. Penslar, Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (Berkeley, CA, 2001); Rachel Shulkins, “Imagining the Other: The Jew in Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington,” European Romantic Review 22 (2011): 477–99.

  8. 8.

    Pamela E. Swett, S. Jonathan Wiesen, and Jonathan R. Zatlin, eds., Selling Modernity: Advertising in Twentieth-Century Germany (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007); Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, MA, 1996.)

  9. 9.

    See Arno Herzog, Jüdische Geschichte in Deutschland: Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 1997); Hasia Diner, The Jews of the United States, 1654–2000 (Berkeley, 2004); Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven, CT, 2004). See also Nils Roemer and Gideon Reuveni, “Introduction: Longing, Belonging, and the Making of Jewish Consumer Culture,” in Reuveni & Roemer, eds., Longing and Belonging, 1.

  10. 10.

    Jerry Z. Muller, Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton, NJ, 2010). See also Jerry Z. Muller, “Capitalism and the Jews Revisited,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 58 (2015): 9–23; and his earlier studies on Marx, Weber, Simmel, and Sombart in Jerry Z. Muller, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought (New York, 2002), 166–207, 229–57.

  11. 11.

    Penslar, Shylock’s Children; Jonathan Karp, The Politics of Jewish Commerce: Economic Thought and Emancipation in Europe, 1638–1848 (Cambridge, 2008). See also Adam Teller, “Economic Life,” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Economic_Life, which includes helpful reading suggestions; Maristella Botticini, “Jewish Diaspora,” in Joel Mokyr, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History (Oxford, 2003), iii: 204–207.

  12. 12.

    Marni Davis, Jews and Booze: Becoming American in the Age of Prohibition (New York, 2012); Paul Lerner, The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880–1940 (Ithaca, NY, 2015); Adam Mendelsohn, The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire (New York, 2015); Hasia Diner, Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migration to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way (New Haven, CT, 2015).

  13. 13.

    For additional literature, see Hartmut Berghoff and Uwe Spiekermann, “Taking Stock and Forging Ahead: The Past and Future of Consumption History,” in Decoding Modern Consumer Societies, ed. Hartmut Berghoff and Uwe Spiekermann (New York, 2012), 1–13.

  14. 14.

    Robert Liberles, Jews Welcome Coffee: Tradition and Innovation in Early Modern Germany (Waltham, MA, 2012); Sander L. Gilman, “Jews and Smoking,” in Smoke: A Global History of Smoking, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Zhou Xun (London, 2004), 278–85, 384–85; Anna Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union (Bloomington, IN, 2006); Annelie Ramsbrock, The Science of Beauty: Culture and Cosmetics in Modern Germany, 1750–1930 (New York, 2015).

  15. 15.

    Gideon Reuveni, Reading Germany: Literature and Consumer Culture in Germany before 1933 (New York, 2006); Joelle Bahloul, “On ‘Cabbage and Kings’: The Politics of Jewish Identity in Post-Colonial French Society and Cuisine,” in Food in Global History, ed. Raymond Grew (Boulder, CO, 1999), 92–106.

  16. 16.

    “Walter Rathenau über die Frau,” Die jüdische Frau 1, no. 2, May 22, 1925, 6; Martin Buber, “Das Zion der jüdischen Frau,” Die Welt 5, no. 17, 1901, 3–5. See also Kerry Wallach’s essay in this volume.

  17. 17.

    Nils Roemer and Gideon Reuveni, “Longing, Belonging, and the Making of Jewish Consumer Culture,” in Longing, Belonging, ed. Roemer and Reuveni, 1–22. As an example, see Maria Balinska, The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread (New Haven, CT, 2008).

  18. 18.

    Roxanne Howland and Joyce M. Wolburg, Advertising, Society, and Consumer Culture (London, 2015), 51; Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, CA, 1982), Victoria de Grazia with Ellen Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things; Ellen Furlough, Consumer Cooperation in France: The Politics of Consumption (Ithaca, NY, 1991); Ulrich Wyrwa, “Consumption and Consumer Society: Contribution to the History of Ideas,” in Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century, ed. Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt (Cambridge, 1998), 431–47; Frank Trentmann, “Beyond Consumerism: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption,” Journal of Contemporary History 39 (2005): 373–401.

  19. 19.

    See Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life (Cambridge, 2007).

  20. 20.

    Leora Auslander, ““National Taste?’ Citizenship Law, State Form, and Everyday Aesthetics in Modern France and Germany, 1920–1940,” in The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America, ed. Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton (Oxford, 2001), 109–128, here 121–128. See also Leora Auslander, “‘Jewish Taste?’ Jews, and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life in Paris and Berlin, 1933–1942,” in Histories of Leisure, ed. Rudy Koshar (Oxford, 2002), 299–318; and Ibid., “The Boundaries of Jewishness or When Is a Cultural Practice Jewish?” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 8 (2009): 47–64. For a treatment of Jewish taste in turn-of-the-century Vienna, see Elana Shapria, Style and Seduction: Jewish Patrons, Architecture, and Design in Fin-de-Siécle Vienna (Waltham, MA, 2015).

  21. 21.

    Leora Auslander, “Jews and Material Culture,” in Cambridge Modern Jewish History, ed. Mitchell B. Hart and Tony Michels (Cambridge, 2012, viii: 831–57).

  22. 22.

    Global historians would also refer to the creation of a western commercial sphere, based on similar technologies and commodities; see, for instance, Jonathan Daly, The Rise of Western Power: A Comparative History of Western Civilization (London, 2014).

  23. 23.

    For example: Jürgen Kocka, Geschichte des Kapitalismus (Munich, 2014); Thomas Picketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA, 2017); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2015); Jürgen Kocka and Marcen van der Linden, eds., Capitalism: The Reemergence of a Global Concept (London, 2018).

  24. 24.

    See Gideon Reuveni, Consumer Culture and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity (Cambridge, 2017).

  25. 25.

    Quoted in Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 (Princeton, NJ, 1981), 177.

  26. 26.

    Émile Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise (Oxford, 1995), 427.

  27. 27.

    See, for example, Peter Stürzebecher, Das Berliner Warenhaus (Berlin, 1979), 25; Alarich Rooch, “Wertheim, Tietz und das KaDeWe in Berlin: Zur Architektursprache eines Kulturraumes,” in Das Berliner Warenhaus: Geschichte und Diskurse / The Berlin Department Store: History and Discourse, ed. Godela Weiss-Sussex and Ulrike Zitzlsperger (Frankfurt am Main, 2013), 167–98.

  28. 28.

    Leigh Schmidt, “The Commercialization of the Calendar: American Holidays and the Culture of Consumption, 1870–1930,” Journal of American History 78 (1991): 887–916; John M. Giggie and Diane Winston, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Religion and Urban Commercial Culture in Modern North America,” in Faith in the Market: Religion and the Rise of Modern Commercial Culture, ed. John M. Giggie and Diane Winston (Piscataway, NJ, 2002), 1–12; Elizabeth H. Pleck, Celebrating the Family: Ethnicity, Consumer Culture and Family Rituals (Cambridge, MA, 2000); Daniel Sack, Whitebread Protestants: Food and Religion in American Culture (New York, 2001). Protests and calls for boycotts are an integral element of any consumer society; see Bill Tallen, What would Jesus Buy? Fabulous Prayers in the Face of the Shopocalypse (New York, 2006). On Germany, see, for example, Joe Perry, Christmas in Germany: A Cultural History (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010). On the British context, see the fascinating work by Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (New Haven, CT, 2009).

  29. 29.

    Gerbern S. Oegema, The History of the Shield of David: The Birth of a Symbol (Frankfurt am Main, 1996).

  30. 30.

    Etan Diamond, “Beyond Borscht: The Kosher Lifestyle and the Religious Consumerism of Suburban Orthodox Jews,” in Faith in the Market, ed. Giggie and Winston, 227–45.

  31. 31.

    See, for example, Leah Hochman, ed., Tastes of Faith: Jewish Eating in the United States (West Lafayette, IN, 2017); and Anat Hochman, ed., Jews and Their Foodways, Studies in Contemporary Jewry 28 (2015).

  32. 32.

    Thomas Schlich, “The Word of God and the Word of Science: Nutrition Science and the Jewish Dietary Laws in Germany, 1820–1920,” in The Science and Culture of Nutrition, 1840–1940, ed. Harmke Kamminga and Andrew Cunningham (Amsterdam, 1995), 97–128.

  33. 33.

    Robin Judd, “The Politics of Beef: Animal Advocacy and the Kosher Butchering Debates in Germany,” Jewish Social Studies 10 (2003): 117–50; Robin Judd, Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843–1933 (Ithaca, NY, 2007).

  34. 34.

    The importance and continuity of normative religious laws was emphasized by David Kraemer, Jewish Eating and Identity through the Ages (New York, 2007).

  35. 35.

    Sue Fishkoff, Kosher Nation: Why More and More of America’s Food Answers to a Higher Authority (New York, 2010); Roger Horowitz, Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Food (New York, 2016).

  36. 36.

    John Cooper, Eat and Be Satisfied: A Social History of Jewish Food (Northvale, NJ, 1993); Gil Marks, Encyclopedia of Jewish Food (Hoboken, 2010).

  37. 37.

    Jeffrey A. Marx, “Eating Up: The Origins of Bagels and Lox,” in Tastes of Faith, ed. Hochman, 77–114.

  38. 38.

    “A Jewish Product with an International Reputation,” Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, April 11, 1924, 8.

  39. 39.

    Horowitz, Kosher USA, chap. 6.

  40. 40.

    Shaul Stampfer, “Bagel and Falafel: Two Iconic Jewish Foods and One Modern Jewish Identity,” in Jews and Their Foodways, ed. Anat Helman, 177–203; Dafna Hirsch and Ofra Tene, “Hummus: The Making of an Israeli Culinary Cult,” Journal of Consumer Culture 13 (2013): 25–45.

  41. 41.

    For this and additional case studies, see Michael Wex, Rhapsody in Schmaltz: Yiddish Food and Why We Can’t Stop Eating It (New York, 2016).

  42. 42.

    “Give Good Meal for Seven Cents,” Wausau Daily Herald, March 20, 1908, 6.

  43. 43.

    See Benno Nietzel, Handeln und Überleben. Jüdische Unternehmer aus Frankfurt am Main 1924–1964 (Göttingen, 2012).

  44. 44.

    Historical analysis of fashion has only just begun to analyze the industry in terms of its links to Jewish consumer culture. Leonard J. Greenspoon, Fashioning Jews: Clothing, Culture, and Commerce (West Lafayette, IN, 2013), with examples from the United States, Austria, and Germany; Eric Silverman, A Cultural History of the Jewish Dress (London, 2013); Roberta S. Kremer, ed., Broken Threads: The Destruction of the Jewish Fashion Industry in Germany and Austria (London, 2006); Uwe Westphal, Berliner Konfektion und Mode: Die Zerstörung einer Tradition, 1836–1939 (Berlin, 1992).

  45. 45.

    Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German-American Business Biographies, 1720 to the Present, http://immigrantentrepreneurship.org/.

  46. 46.

    [Berliner] Volks-Zeitung (1896), no 581, December 11, 4.

  47. 47.

    Theodor Herzl, Der Judenstaat, 8th ed. (1896; Berlin, 1920).

  48. 48.

    [Carl] F[riedrich] Heman, Das Wiedererwachen der jüdischen Nation (Basel, 1897), esp. 43–44.

  49. 49.

    See, for example, Doreet LeVitte Harten and Yigal Zalmona, eds., Die Neuen Hebräer: 100 Jahre Kunst in Israel (Berlin, 2005); Orit Rozin, The Rise of the Individual in 1950s Israel (Waltham, MA, 2011); Anat Helman, “Was There Anything Particularly Jewish about the First Hebrew City?” in The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times, ed. Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblet and Jonathan Karp (Philadelphia, 2008), 116–27; Oz Almog, The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew (Berkeley, CA, 2000); Hizky Shoham, “Buy Local’ or ‘Buy Jewish’? Separatist Consumption in Interwar Palestine,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45 (2013): 469–89; Deborah Bernstein and Badi Hasisi, “‘Buy and Promote the National Cause’: Consumption, Class Formation and Nationalism in Mandate Palestine Society,” Nations and Nationalism 14 (2008): 127–50. See also Hizky Shoham’s chapter in this volume.

  50. 50.

    See, for instance, A. Bonne, “Neue Probleme im Lande der Bibel,” Die Umschau 32 (1928): 976–980. For a recent historical study, see Aviva Halamish, Kibbutz: Utopia and Politics: The Life and Times of Meir Yaari, 1897–1987 (Brighton, MA, 2017).

  51. 51.

    Yoram S. Carmeli and Kalman Applbaum, eds., Consumption and Market Society in Israel (Oxford, 2004).

  52. 52.

    Werner Sombart, Die Zukunft der Juden (Leipzig, 1912), 40.

  53. 53.

    David Biale, “Jewish Consumer Culture in Historical and Contemporary Perspective,” in Longing, Belonging, ed. Reuveni and Roemer, 23–38, here 23–24.

  54. 54.

    Riv-Ellen Prell, “Why Jewish princesses don’t sweat: desire and consumption in postwar American Jewish culture,” in People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective, ed. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz (Albany, NY, 1992), 329–359.

  55. 55.

    Adam Röder, “Die ‘Judenfrage’ in Willy Hellpachs ‘Politischen Prognosen’,” Der Morgen 4 (1928/29): 393–399, here 397.

  56. 56.

    “Öffentliches Auftreten,” Frankfurter Israelitisches Gemeindeblatt 11 (1932/33): 219.

  57. 57.

    “Worte der Mahnung,” Frankfurter Israelitisches Gemeindeblatt 12 (1933/34): 263. See Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899; New York, 1965).

  58. 58.

    “Americanization of the Jews,” Lead Daily Call, May 21, 1903, 3.

  59. 59.

    Andrew Heinze, “Jewish Street Merchants and Mass Consumption in New York City, 1880–1914,” in East European Jews in America, 1880–1920: Immigration and Adaption, ed. Jeffrey S. Gurock (New York, 1998), iii: 1063–78.

  60. 60.

    Helene Hanna Cohn, “Die New Yorker Jüdin,” Neue jüdische Monatshefte 2 (1917/18): 499–506, here 505.

  61. 61.

    Darcy Buerkle, “Gendered Spectatorship, Jewish Women and Psychological Advertising in Weimar Germany,” Women’s History Review 15 (2006), 625–36.

  62. 62.

    See Tara Zahra, The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World (New York, 2016); Mark Wischnitzer, To Dwell in Safety: The Story of Jewish Migration Since 1800 (Philadelphia, 1948).

  63. 63.

    Carmel U. Chiswick, How Economics Helped Shape American Judaism (Bonn, 2010), 1.

  64. 64.

    Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America (New York, 1981); Susan A. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca, NY, 1990); Jeffrey S. Gurock, ed., Central European Jews in America, 1840–1880: Migration and Advancement (New York, 1998); Lenderhendler, Jewish Immigrants; Aviva Ben-Ur, Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History (New York, 2009).

  65. 65.

    Rebecca Korbin, ed., Chosen Capital: The Jewish Encounter with American Capitalism (New Brunswick, NJ, 2012).

  66. 66.

    “Rabbi Joseph and the Jews,” Democrat and Chronicle [Rochester], August 13, 1888, 8.

  67. 67.

    Hasia R. Diner, Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way (New Haven, CT, 2015), 202.

  68. 68.

    Ibid., 208.

  69. 69.

    See, for example, Stefanie Schüler Springorum, “A Soft Hero: Male Jewish Identity in Imperial Germany through the Autobiography of Aron Liebeck,” in Jewish Masculinities: German Jews, Gender and History, ed. Benjamin Maria Baader, Sharon Gillerman, and Paul Lerner (Bloomington, IN, 2012), 90–113.

  70. 70.

    See, for example, Annie Pollard and Daniel Soyer, Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration (New York, 2012); Tobias Brinkmann, Von der Gemeinde zur “Community”: Jüdische Einwanderer in Chicago 1840–1900 (Osnabrück, 2002).

  71. 71.

    “Argument for Reform,” The Courier-Journal [Louisville], June 28, 1904, 2; Tobias Brinkmann, “The Road from Damascus: Transnational Jewish Philanthropic Organizations and the Jewish Mass Migration from Eastern Europe 1860–1914,” in Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, Networks, and Issues from the 1840s to the 1930s, ed. Davide Rodogno, Jakob Vogel, and Bernhard Struck (New York, 2015), 152–72.

  72. 72.

    “The Agent’s Bothers,” Evening Star [Washington], Jan 28, 1905, 30.

  73. 73.

    Elias Tobenkin, “Free Information Concerning Adopted Country the Greatest Need of Newly Arrived Immigrants,” Chicago Tribune, March 7, 1909, 33.

  74. 74.

    It should not be forgotten, however, that Americanization was enforced by the gentile majority during and after World War I, see “Americanization Day for Jewish Immigrants,” The Wichita Beacon, January 25, 1919, 1.

  75. 75.

    Barry R. Chiswick, “Jewish Immigrant Wages in America in 1909: An Analysis of the Dillingham Commission Data,” Explorations in Economic History 29 (1992): 274–89. Some important differentiations were made by Daniel Bender, “‘A Hero … for the Weak’: Work, Consumption, and the Enfeebled Jewish Worker, 1881–1924,” International Labor and Working-Class History 56 (1999): 1–22.

  76. 76.

    See J[ames] Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler, Entertaining America: Jews, Movies and Broadcasting (Princeton, 2003); Jeffrey S. Gurock, Judaism’s encounter with American Sports (Indiana, IN, 2005); Paul Buhle, ed., Jews and American Popular Culture, 3 vols. (Westport, CT, 2007); Jenna Weismann Joselit, The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880–1950 (New York, 1994); David Kaufman, Jewhooing the Sixties: American Celebrity and Jewish Identity—Sandy Koufax, Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan and Barbra Streisand (Waltham, MA, 2012).

  77. 77.

    Carmel U. Chiswick, Judaism in Transition: How Economic Choices Shape Religious Tradition (Redwood, CA, 2014).

  78. 78.

    Jonathan Karp, “Rev. of Chiswick, Judaism in Transition,” American Jewish Studies Review 39 (2015): 473–475, here 473.

  79. 79.

    See, for example, Hizky Shoham, “‘A Birthday Party, Only a Little Bigger;’ A Historical Anthropology of the Israeli Bat Mitzvah,” Jewish Culture and History 19 (2018): 275–92; Hizky Shoham, “The Bar and Bat Mitzvah in the Yishuv and Early Israel: from Initiation Rite to Birthday Party,” AJS Review 42 (April 2018): 133–57.

  80. 80.

    Shaul Kelner, Tours That Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage, and Israeli Birthright Tourism (New York, 2002).

  81. 81.

    Andrew R. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance. Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (New York, 1990).

  82. 82.

    Riv-Ellen Prell, Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender, and the Anxiety of Assimilation (Boston, 1999); Riv-Ellen Prell, “The Economic Turn in American Jewish History: When Women (Mostly) Disappeared,” American Jewish History 103 (2019): 485–512; Val Marie Johnson, “‘Look for the Moral and Sex Sides of the Problem’: Investigating Jewishness, Desire, and Discipline at Macy’s Department Store, New York City, 1913,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 18 (2009): 457–485; Jenna Weissman Joselit, A Perfect Fit: Clothes, Character, and the Promise of America (New York, 2001).

  83. 83.

    Paula E. Hyman, “Immigrant Women and Consumer Protest: The New York City Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902,” American Jewish History 70 (1980): 91–105. For a vivid description, see “Meat Boycott Growing,” Saint Paul Globe, May 25, 1902, 4.

  84. 84.

    Examples of such consumer activism can be found in “Cheaper Meat in Elizabeth,” Courier-News [Bridgewater, NJ], Jul 17, 1907, 8; “District Attorney Moore—To Address Jewish Women,” Buffalo Evening News, May 19, 1917, 4; “Jewish Kehilah Pledges Loyalty,” Hartford Courant, April 24, 1918, 2.

  85. 85.

    Jeffrey Podoshen, “Distressing Events and Future Purchase Decisions: Jewish Consumers and the Holocaust,” Journal of Consumer Marketing 26 (2009): 263–76. See also Anne Schenderlein’s essay in this volume.

  86. 86.

    Marie J. Clifford, “Helena Rubenstein’s Beauty Salons, Fashion, and Modernist Display,” Winterthur Portfolio 38 (2003): 83–108.

  87. 87.

    Andrew Heinze, “Advertising and Consumer Culture in the United States,” in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia, February 27, 2009, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/advertising-and-consumer-culture-in-united-states.

  88. 88.

    See Kerri P. Steinberg, Jewish Mad Men: Advertising and the Design of the American Jewish Experience (New Brunswick, 2015).

  89. 89.

    See Stefan Schwarzkopf and Rainer Gries, eds., Ernest Dichter and Motivation Research: New Perspectives on the Making of Post-War Consumer Culture (New York, 2010); Joseph Malherek, “Victor Gruen’s Retail Therapy: Exiled Jewish Communities and the Invention of the American Shopping Mall as a Postwar Ideal,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 61 (2016): 1–14; Jan Logemann, Engineered to Sell: European Émigrés and the Making of Consumer Capitalism (Chicago, 2019). See also Paul Lerner’s contribution to this volume.

  90. 90.

    See Kathleen Loock, “‘Dearer than diamonds:’ Die Bedeutung der Esskultur in jüdisch-amerikanischer Einwanderungsliteratur der Jahrhundertwende,” in Über den Tellerrand geschaut: Migration und Ernährung in historischer Perspektive (18. bis 20. Jahrhundert), ed. Mathias Beer (Essen, 2014), 127–151 (although based on very few sources).

  91. 91.

    See Alan M. Kraut, “Ethnic Foodways: The Significance of Food in the Designation of Cultural Boundaries between Immigrant Groups in the U.S.,” Journal of American Culture 2 (1979): 409–420; David A. Gerber and Alan M. Kraut, “Traditions and Invented Traditions,” in American Immigration and Ethnicity: A Reader, ed. David A. Gerber and Alan M. Kraut (New York, 2005), 300–18; Donna R. Gabacchia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge, 1998), 69–71; Hochman, ed., Tastes of Faith; Ted Merwin, Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (New York, 2015).

  92. 92.

    For a useful analytical framework, see Sharon Gillerman, “A Kinder Gentler Strongman? Siegmund Breitbart in Eastern Europe,” in Jewish Masculinities, ed. Baader, Gillerman, and Lerner, 197–209.

  93. 93.

    Daniel Miller, Stuff (London, 2012); Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1988); Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA, 1999).

  94. 94.

    In addition to works cited above, see Sarah A. Stein, Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (New Haven, CT, 2010), for an example of this kind of work.

  95. 95.

    Michal Kümper et al., eds., Makom Orte und Räume im Judentum. Real. Abstrakt. Imaginär. Essays (Hildesheim, 2007); Julia Brauch, Anna Lipphardt, and Alexandra Nocke, eds., Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place (Aldershot, 2008); Barbara Mann, Space and Place in Jewish Studies (New Brunswick, NJ, 2012); Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup, eds., Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History (New York, 2017).

  96. 96.

    Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA, 1987).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany

    Uwe Spiekermann

  2. Department of History, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Paul Lerner

  3. Dahlem Humanities Center, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Anne Schenderlein

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  1. Department of History, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Paul Lerner

  2. University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany

    Uwe Spiekermann

  3. Dahlem Humanities Center, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Anne Schenderlein

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Spiekermann, U., Lerner, P., Schenderlein, A. (2022). Jews, Consumer Culture, and Jewish Consumer Cultures: An Introduction. In: Lerner, P., Spiekermann, U., Schenderlein, A. (eds) Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America. Worlds of Consumption. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88960-9_1

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